Current mood:	cold
Current music:	Bach Partita IV Pires

Music as a time capsule...
Images and photos bring back memories. Certain smells bring back memories too... and occasionally so does food...

But nothing brings back memories like music.

Especially if you haven't heard the song since the last time you heard it back in the early 90s. I just found an old favorite CD of mine. In fact it was the first CD that I ever purchased. I must've been 8 years old. It's the soundtrack to a Korean show (aka Korean drama) called "The Pilot" from 1993. This favorite show of mine was about a guy who became an airline pilot for the Korean Air and his journey through the training process--but the central focus of the story was on his relationship with his love interest. I don't remember all that much about the show to be honest, but what I do remember is that the show was a huge hit in Korea around 1993. My girlfriend at the time (also in the 3rd grade) and I used to pretend we were the two main characters from the show and we would play silly role playing games at school (well that sounded naughtier than it actually was). Then I would come home and listen to this soundtrack feeling all romantic and cool. Then I became obsessed with wanting to become a pilot for the Korean Air. What a funny concept. Me. An airline pilot.

When I play the music from this soundtrack, I feel rather strange... an eerie feeling comes over me. I feel things that I felt so many years ago as I listened to these sounds. These harmonies and voices... they haven't changed, yet I have. But they bring me back to 1993. It's been over 15 years. That is a long time. For me at least. Somehow though I remember the emotions I felt vividly, the setup in my bedroom, and how I used to play with the buttons on my CD player as I listened to these tracks. Listening to this music is like jumping into a time capsule, reliving myself from 1993. It's actually very sad... remembering yourself from a young age. You remember the kind of innocence you once had, the unflinching hope you had for the bright future, and the kind of love you received from your mom. It's all very different now, nothing is what I had expected... I never in a million years thought I'd be living in a foreign country to begin with.

Before going to see MTT and the San Francisco Symphony tonight, I had a very nice talk with Cornelius in the courthouse lawn, continuing on with our discussion on questions of life and existence. More breakthroughs I had today talking to the wise friend, and through these new realizations, more beauties in life were found. Beauties are found in chaos and struggle, without them, life truly is static. The bigger the hilltop, the bigger the awards are on the other side. Somehow I had forgotten for awhile there... the best part about being human is that we are flawed and therefore we continually strive for perfection, despite realizing that it's impossible to get there. If perfection existed, we wouldn't be here in the first place. Funny that last phrase could mean different things to different people! I also determined (for now) that while we do have "free will", the cost of of the side effects are not worth it. So ultimately, (for most of us at least) we are trapped to do what we are built to do... and there's not much we can do because we can't all the sudden fight against the millions of years of evolution. At some point the bell started ringing and we had to run to the concert hall, but up until then we did have an interesting discussion trying to strip away at the notion that love exists as we humans like to think of it. I have to think more about it before I come to any conclusion. But the idea of "love" is an interesting concept.